Friday, March 4, 2011

White House Gases

by Peter Jay O'Heyne

I just watched my home heating oil delivery truck leave my driveway and along with it about $600 for 160 gallons of fuel; this, after topping off my car at $3.55 a gallon with my bag of price-inflated groceries in the back seat. Now the media won't do it, electronic, printed or otherwise, so I will: thank you President Obama for the destructive, anti-growth policies that have caused my heating, food and gas prices to soar even as my home’s value plummets.

I am sure that there are those Obama apologists who will point to the chaos in the Middle East as the cause for the skyrocketing oil prices. While the recent unrest has had some minimal effect, the most significant factor has been increased oil demand worldwide. Proof of this is the fact that industry analysts were predicting $4 a gallon by summer and as high as $5 next year, months before the current Middle East upheaval.

The fact is that the Obama administration is repeating the mistakes of Jimmy Carter’s failed energy policies, which defined his term and were a significant part of the “misery index” of the late seventies. Some of us are old enough to remember the gas lines during the Carter administration and family members taking turns getting up before dawn to be the first in line. Well get your alarm clocks out, Obama’s policies are leading us straight into another national energy disaster.

Mr. Obama’s energy policy is a hodgepodge of green Utopian ideals; not really bad but not really practical either: more biofuel production, electric vehicle production and renewable power production. These are simply disastrous policies. The primary source of biomass production is corn-based ethanol which produces less energy per unit than gasoline while contributing to food price increases. Taxpayers subsidize ethanol production to the tune of $4 billion a year while producing only 2 percent of the total gasoline supply. The electric car is prohibitively expensive and like so many things this administration does, is unwanted by the vast majority of Americans. The other sources, wind and solar, contribute less than 1% to power generation and have no effect on the supply of gasoline. The environmental efficacy of ethanol is dubious as is the electric car; after all, that car must plug in and recharge using electricity likely supplied by a coal-powered generator.

In the face of all this, most prudent leaders would ramp up our own energy resources mining. In fact, the Obama administration has done the opposite and forcefully moved to cut our domestic energy supplies. The Interior Department has canceled scores of oil and gas drilling leases in the Green River Formation alone, where there is estimated to be more than three times the reserve of recoverable oil than Saudi Arabia. In the aftermath of the BP spill in the Gulf of New Mexico, the administration issued two bans on drilling, logic akin to grounding all air travel due to a single crash. Obama also refuses to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and has stopped off shore drilling in California, Florida, Texas and Louisiana. Not only has he shut off oil supplies, he has also cost these states thousands of jobs. I could go on, but you get the picture.